How Cortana Could Have Survived
by Cor Tenebrae
Summary: A Discussion of Platonic Metaphysics, an Argument for the Immortality of the Soul, and a Defense of Deus Ex Machina. This essay will contain an argument for Cortana's survival that I believe no one has thought of before. It is what I like to call the Radical Platonist Theory. It will be posted in two parts and will exist to compliment my story Halo: Civil War
1. Chapter 1

HOW CORTANA COULD HAVE SURVIVED

A Discussion of Platonic Metaphysics, an Argument for the Immortality of the Soul, and a Defense of Deus Ex Machina

PART I

Like many of you my initial belief that Cortana had somehow survived her destruction at the end of Halo 4 was more the product of earnest hope rather than having a basis in any concrete logic. It was an emotional belief stemming from the attachment that had grown between the character and the player. It would seem, at first glance, that there is no possible way for Cortana to have survived. She was on the verge of succumbing to rampancy, had stretched and fractured herself in order to stop the Didact, and her programming had been present on the Mantel's Approach when it was destroyed by the nuclear explosion.

However, though the belief in her survival may have originated within the realm of emotion, that does not mean she could not survived at all. There are many theories surrounding Cortana's possible survival, the most popular of which being that Cortana somehow retreated or otherwise thrusted into the Domain, that the Librarian made a copy of her back on Requiem, that the Composer somehow survived the destruction by retreating into the slipspace portal underneath and Cortana was encoded into it, or that Cortana, like the humans composed in New Phoenix, was transported to Requiem along all the shipboard data on Mantel's Approach and was later transported to another installation when Requiem was destroyed.

These theories all have some basis in cannon as well as logic, but I do not believe that any of them are right. As explicitly stated in Halo: Silentium, the Domain which was based on Precursor neural physics was destroyed when the Halo Array was activated. That the Librarian made a copy of her is equally unlikely as it would violate Cortana's statements on the Ivanof Research Station. The copy, no matter how similar, would not be her. It would not have the memories of everything that happened in the game after contact was made with the Librarian, and therefore would not be the same Cortana. It is unlikely that 343 would include that dialogue if not for expressed purpose of ruling out the possibility of a newly created Cortana being the same Cortana. Similarly, this would also rule out the possibility of Cortana having been encoded into the Composer, or being transported to another Forerunner installation, as it would have to of happened before her final meeting with the Master Chief. That single scene, though brief, is enough to show that any Cortana having all her memories excluding that point in time would not be the real Cortana.

So how could Cortana have survived. Well I believe that the answer is simple, and one that it seems nobody has considered yet.

Cortana has a soul, and the soul is immortal.

On its face I realize how ridiculous that proposition sounds. This is Halo after all. While it may push the limits of scientific plausibility it certainly does not delve into the supernatural. The thing is, we do not have to appeal to the supernatural or to religion in order to believe in the existence of the soul. An argument for its existence can be wholly secular. In other words, you can believe in the soul and still be an atheist. It may sound like a foreign concept, but I respectfully ask for your indulgence. Furthermore, the more specific question we need to ask is does the soul exist within the context of the Halo Universe? Obviously, the existence of the soul in our world has no bearing on whether or not the soul exists in Halo, and conversely the existence of the soul within Halo has no bearing on the existence of the soul in our world. So there appears to be three questions I have to answer in order to make this argument plausible.

Does the soul exist within the Halo Universe?

Does Cortana have a soul?

Is the soul immortal?

Fortunately my task is made easier by the fact that in the process of answering the first question, the second one will be rendered irrelevant. Hopefully by the end of my first set of arguments you will understand why.

On to the first question, does the soul exist in Halo? In order to answer this I must make an appeal to philosophy. Until just recently it would be a correct assertion to say that Halo and philosophy (except for perhaps moral philosophy) do not have much in common. Since the release of the Forerunner Saga this no longer holds true. The Precursors were beings so advanced that they were able to combine the disciplines of science and philosophy together through neural physics which allowed them to create structures, such as the Domain, which exist entirely within the metaphysical realm. But what is metaphysics?

To put it simply, the metaphysical is that which cannot be observed or measured except through the use of our minds and our logic. One of the oldest, and in my opinion the best, descriptions of the metaphysical world is Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

The story unfolds like this. Imagine a cavern, deep within the recesses of the cave and in which no sunlight can penetrate. Within this cavern are a group of prisoners. They are chained to rocks so that they can neither move their bodies or their heads, forced to only be able to look at the cave wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners, raised above their heads, is a fire. The light from the fire casts shadows, including shadows of themselves. As they cannot move their heads to look at their own bodies, or at the fellow prisoners next to them, they believe that these shadows are in fact their real selves.

Now imagine that someone has erected a raised platform underneath the fire. On the platform men walk back and forth, holding a wide menagerie of objects above their heads, in front of the fire. These objects cause more shadows to appear, the light of the fire and the cave wall on which they are projected causing them to be distorted. The prisoners begin to converse with one another, holding contests to see who could recognize the shadow images the fastest, and who could predict, like prophets, which shadows would appear next by interpreting the sequence in which the objects are brought out. Those who are the most proficient at identifying the shadows are held in high esteem, lauded as being men of great intellect and wisdom.

Suppose then that one of the prisoners is set free, and is compelled to stand and to walk outside the light of the fire. The first thing he would notice is his own body, marveling at its form which he could previously only observe indirectly. He would find that now he is outside the light of the fire, and that his shadow has disappeared. Surely he would come to the conclusion that, unlike what he previously believed, that his body and its shadow were not one in the same. That his shadow could vanish, and he would remain.

Now he is compelled to look at the fire. At first he would be blinded, having only ever seen the light as it was reflected off of the cave wall. Once his vision had cleared he would see the raised platform, and the men holding objects in front of the fire. Surely he must conclude that these objects are in fact more real than the shadows they cast. Suppose further that he is compelled to ascend out of the cave, and for the first time in his life is exposed to the outside world. Again, just like with the fire, he would be blinded by the light of the sun, its intensity so great that his mind would be subjected to great pain just by the act of looking at it. Once again, his vision eventually adjusts, and he sees the world around him. The grass, the trees, the winged birds of the air, the fish jumping in a nearby pond, a rose growing in the ground in front of him. He sees the shadows they cast, sees how similar they are to the shadows of the cave. And, just like the cave wall, he notices that all the objects, the trees, the grass, the rose, are all reflecting the light of the sun. That the sun's light is the originator of everything visible that he sees around him, and that if it were to ever go out there would be no sight at all. Everything plunged into eternal darkness.

Eventually his mind turns back to the cave, and to his fellow prisoners who are still trapped inside. Of his own free will the man descends back down into the cave, past the fire, past the men and the object, past the raised platform, and too the chained prisoners. Now his vision is once again obstructed, not by light, but by darkness, and he has trouble discerning the shadows in front of him. When he attempts to tell the prisoners what he has seen, they think him a mad man, and in an attempt to question his intelligence ask him to identify the shadows on the wall and predict in which order they come in. Naturally, with his eyesight still weakened by the darkness and his memory clouded by the revelations he has just been witnessed to, he cannot complete the task. He is laughed at, ridiculed and mocked, and the prisoners banish the men from their presence.

Once he leaves, defeated by the very men he had come to free, the prisoners begin conversing among themselves. They are infuriated by the man who dared to come to them and claim that everything they thought was real was actually a lie, and they agree that the next man who attempted to break his chains and to ascend out of the cave would be put to death as the most vile of heretics.

That is Plato's Cave, and the message of the parable is clear. Our world, the world of tangible objects, of physical reality, a world of entropy and decay, is an illusion. It is the metaphysical world, the world that cannot be observed or measured except within the realm of logic, which is more real than the physical one. The physical world is impermanent and always changing. The metaphysical is eternal. It is the deluded mind, reinforced by the norms of society, which enslaves us to the false proposition that this world is all that exists. In Plato's view in order to become truly wise we must reject the physical, to detach our minds from our bodies as much as it is possible within this life, to commune with the metaphysical. To become, in a sense, transcendent, much like the Precursors.

But what is an example of something that is metaphysical?

Consider, for a moment, a circle. What is a circle itself? What distinguishes a circle for all other geometric objects, and more importantly, how do we know that circles are real? A circle, in its most simplistic sense, is perfect roundness. However, there is no such thing as a perfectly round object in this world. We can draw representations of a circle. We can point to objects around us that look like a circle, but none of us have ever actually seen a perfect circle. The circle is a metaphysical concept. It does not exist, except within the realm of logic, and yet circles are real. We can think about circles, we can develop mathematical principles such as diameter, radius, and Pi based off of the concept of circles, and if put to the test we find that these mathematical principles are always true. The circumference will always equal to Pi times the diameter, and Pi will always be equal to the circumference divided by the diameter. We know these things to be true even though a circle has never actually been observed. Therefore we must conclude that circles do exist, but not as we do. Their existence is not physical, but metaphysical.

Circles are eternal. They are, in a sense, immortal. Even if all of physical reality were to be destroyed, circles would continue to exist.

The same thing is true for numbers. Take the number nineteen for instance. When you write the number 19 on a piece of paper you are surely not deluded enough to suppose that those few scribbles are the number itself. Those arcane scribbles are only a representation of what nineteen really is. Nineteen will always be nineteen whether or not it is written as 19 or as the Roman Numeral XIX, whether it is written in Forerunner or Covenant glyphs, or even if there were no sentient beings in the universe that were capable of conceiving the number. Nineteen is not subjective. It is not dependent on human interpretation. It will not be an odd number one day and even the next, or a prime number one day and a composite number the next. Nineteen will always be odd, always be prime, always be a product of ten plus nine or eleven plus eight.

Nineteen is eternal. Nineteen is immortal. Nineteen is the truth.

Nineteen, in a very literal sense, is more real than we are. Or is it?

Plato took the concept that mathematics were eternal, and applied it to other metaphysical forms. Truth itself, beauty itself, morality itself, art itself, harmony itself, discord itself, and consciousness itself. Consciousness may be tied to physical word by the neural pathways within our brains, but it is also something metaphysical. You cannot take a scan of the brain or dissect it and point to where consciousness resides. You cannot hold consciousness in your hands. You cannot smell it, taste it, hear it, or measure it. It cannot be observed except through logic. It is metaphysical, and so Plato concludes, much like mathematical truths, eternal and immortal.

But how does this relate to Halo? As I said before, whether or not the soul exists in our world does not mean that the soul exists in Halo. For proof that the soul exists in Halo, let us examine the Precursors.

They were transcendent beings, capable of having their consciousness exist without the benefit of a human body. Could live in a physical form, and be reborn in another, all of this made possible by their vast understanding of neural physics, a combination of science and philosophy. They were even able to survive their own extinction at the hands of the Forerunners, being reincarnated in the form of the Flood. The Forerunners themselves believed that when they died their consciousness would be imprinted onto the Domain, and in fact when Forerunners access the Domain they often come across the imprints of personalities of those who had visited the Domain before. It seems that, within the realm of Halo cannon, the consciousness is not necessarily dependent on a physical form.

The Forerunners, in an attempt to follow the Precursors into transcendence, developed the Composer. The intention of the Composer was to bridge the gap between the artificial and the organic. In the words of Forthencho it is "A composer of minds and souls." The principle behind it was to extract the essences, or mental patterns, of an individual, converting them into raw data. While the Composer did not succeed it is yet another example showing us that in Halo the conscious mind can survive the death of the body. There are also some interesting parallels between the Composer, and the human method of creating Smart AIs. In fact, I believe them to be one and the same. Much like the Composer, the human method of creating Smart AIs destroys the brain upon which they are based, which is why Cortana is unusual in that she is the only AI to be created from a living brain, all others before her having already been deceased. As with Composer, the stored personalities of the Smart AIs eventually fragment through a process called rampancy. The connection between the Composer and the human method of creating Smart AIs is further reinforced by the data logs found on the Ivanoff Station in Halo 4, in which Dr. Halsey remarks that though the human matrix compiler was of her own design it had many similarities with the Composer.

The conclusion, inevitably, is that the soul does exist in Halo, and though we have yet to prove its immortality we have at least seen that it can survive the death of the body. And, as I promised, in the process of answering the first question, we have also answered the second.

The assertion should not be that Cortana has a soul, but that she _is _a soul. The soul of the clone Halsey created of herself and then composed using the human matrix compiler.

**A/N: This essay will be posted in two parts and will be approximately six thousand words long. If you disagree with my arguments so far, please tell me why. I am always open to constructive criticism. **

** Please join me for part two in which I will attempt to answer the third question "Is the Soul Immortal?". In doing so I will be discussing black holes, quantum computers, The Holographic Universe Theory, The Mathematical Universe Theory, as well as a certain part of Halo cannon that I believe many have over looked. There will also be flying monkeys that shoot laser beams out of their eyes. If the thought of that doesn't get you to read the next part, I don't know what will. **


	2. Chapter 2

HOW CORTANA COULD HAVE SURVIVED

A Discussion of Platonic Metaphysics, an Argument for the Immortality of the Soul, and a Defense of Deus Ex Machina

PART II

So, it has been concluded that within the Halo Universe the conscious mind can survive the death of the body (from now on the words consciousness and soul will be used interchangeably). However, this does not mean that the soul itself is immortal. After all while the phenomena of consciousness is still one of the great mysteries of science, there is no doubt that it is closely tied to our physical selves, perhaps irrevocably. Your neural network, neurons, and synapses within your brain all serve to provide your conscious mind with a steady stream of input from the outside world. It may be that once the ties are cut, once the body ceases to be, once all input towards the conscious self ceases, that the soul also ceases to be.

Indeed, even with the Composer the personalities that were extracted from both human and Forerunner subjects fragmented after an unspecified period of time. All attempts to restore them to their physical forms failed. Similar fates await all Smart AIs of the UNSC through the process of rampancy.

One could look towards the Domain, which the Forerunners believed could exist as a sort of after life for them, all sentient beings eventually having their consciousnesses merge with it. However, as stated before the Domain was definitely destroyed, and it seems that the Halo Array which was responsible for this destruction would have also killed the Precursors even in their transcendent form as they based their own quasi immortality off the principles of neural physics.

There is some hope though. The Domain may have been destroyed. Neural physics may have been undone, but the foundation upon which they were built, the metaphysical world itself, would have remained. Neural physics can be destroyed, but metaphysics can never be destroyed. To say that it could would be to say that the intangible concept of a perfect circle, a square, or a triangle could be destroyed. Imagine, for a moment, a building. A high skyscraper deep within the urban jungle of New York City. You can destroy the building, quite easily. A skyscraper which may have taken months or even years to design and build can be demolished in seconds, but the foundation upon which every building in New York is built is solid bedrock. You can destroy the building, but the bedrock will remain, will continue to exist for millions of years after humanity has gone extinct. So too can think of the physical world as a building. Grand and imposing, but ultimately finite and mortal. The foundation on which the physical world is built, however, which is the metaphysical will continue to remain long after our universe is torn asunder.

But what guarantee do we have that the metaphysical realm is the foundation of physical reality, and furthermore, what exactly does this have to do with Halo?

This is a problem I have dwelt on quite a bit, and as I am no philosopher or scientist, merely a layman who likes to write fanfiction about two particular science fiction series, I do have to make appeals to the works of men far smarter than I am. The theories and hypothesis that I will present have been gaining popularity within the scientific community, and at least one of them has been around since the 1970's. While the validity of them is still being debated, these are ideas that have been put forth by serious physicists, quantum physicists, and astrophysicists. Halo, being science fiction, and like all science fiction before it, creates its futuristic world by expounding upon the contemporary frontiers of science. The multiverse theory, which is far from being proven true and is still a subject for much debate, is now a fact within Halo canon. Directed Panspermia, the theory that life was started on Earth by some sort of extra terrestrial force, and is a theory that I personally and fervently do not believe in, is also a canon fact within the Halo Universe. Slipstream Space, the existence of sentient life elsewhere in the galaxy, sentient computer programs, power armor, space zombies; all of these elements have at least some basis in contemporary science. So, while some of the theories I will present may end up being proven wrong in the near or distant future, and some of them I will disagree with, my focus is not on their validity but instead on showing that these theories are have been hinted at by 343 and may show up in some form in future Halo lore.

The first hypothesis we will consider is the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, proposed by Max Tegmark as his own tentative theory of everything. The basic premise of the hypothesis is this. Mathematics is the most powerful tool humans have in their possession when it comes to explaining the universe, going above and beyond what mere words and even images can do to describe fundamental properties of reality. The field of mathematics is also unique. Though math and science are joined at the hip, scientific theories require observation and experimentation in order to prove their validity. In contrast, mathematics can only be proven by more mathematics. Essentially, mathematics proves its own existence, unlike say the existence of gravity, or the theory of evolution which can be proven both through observation and extensive experiments. Despite having an element of faith being intrinsic to the entire concept, mathematics has proven unreasonably successful in predicting and describing phenomena within our universe. It is therefore not a wide logical leap, and may actually be viewed as common sense, to say that the universe itself is mathematics. That everything we see around us, from that dirty sock laying on the floor of your bedroom, to the sun setting outside your window, to the entire milky way galaxy hanging in the sky above your head, is in truth all part of one massive mathematical construct. To put it another way, the universe is nothing more than an extremely complex equation, and that the physical world is an illusion created by our conscious minds in an attempt to make sense of it, and that all of us are nothing more than highly complex mathematical structures ourselves.

Think about the implications of that for a minute. We know that mathematical truths can neither be created nor destroyed. Math is discovered rather than invented. If you are nothing more than a complex mathematical structure, than the equation that makes you, you will always exist, has always existed on the metaphysical plane. Moving to the realm of science fiction, this would mean that the mathematical structure that is Cortana has always existed, and will always exist. It would take a deep understanding of the fundamental properties of the universe far beyond what even the Forerunners were capable of, and certainly beyond what the Master Chief is capable of, but it would be within the realm of possibility to bring her back.

However, I doubt this is where 343 is heading, despite my personal fondness of this hypothesis. It is a nice thought, a nice argument, but I do not believe it to be true, and would not make sense within Halo canon. What does make sense, and what I believe has already been hinted at by virtue of the existence of both the Composer and the Domain, has to do with black holes.

We all have some idea of what a black hole is. They are areas of dense mass which is far disproportional to their size, bending the fabric of space/time itself. All objects that are sucked into a black hole are compressed into a singularity, the gravity so great that even light cannot escape it, for the object caught within the gravity of a black hole inevitably begin to travel beyond the speed of light, and light cannot travel faster than itself. There is a paradox involving black holes. They do not exist forever, eventually evaporating until they disappear from the universe, all the matter and energy trapped inside disappear along with it. This presents a bit of a problem, as one of the most fundamental laws of all physics dictates that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

Wait, you may say. The matter and energy within the black hold was not destroyed, it just disappeared along with the black hole. It's not unreasonable to assume that it was not taken elsewhere. That it continues to exist.

Well, let's take a moment to think about what this law truly means. When we say that matter and energy cannot be created nor destroyed, what we are really saying is that matter and energy can neither be added or subtracted from the universe. That black holes eventually disappear, taking all of their contents along with it, flies in the face of this. A solution to this problem came with the proposition that while the matter and energy that was sucked into the black hole may not continue to exist, the information does. One of the growing ideas in physics is that much like matter can be converted into energy and vice versa, matter and energy can also be converted into information. In fact, we may very well be on the verge of a new scientific maxim.

Information can neither be created nor destroyed.

The idea goes like this. Say that me and you are stuck inside a spaceship together traveling the vastness of the galaxy. Me, suffering from an extreme case of cabin fever, fly into a rage when I find out you ate the last bag of Doritos. In a fit of madness I throw you out of the air lock and into a nearby black hole. This should be the end of you, but interestingly enough this is not the whole story. When you reach the event horizon, the point of no return, of the black hole you cross a superheated two dimensional plane far hotter than the core of the sun. Once you cross that plane, your body, matter and energy, your entire physical being is converted into pure information. This information exists on the event horizon of the black hole, a two dimensional representation of yourself. However, your three dimensional self continues to exist also, still in the midst of its descent towards the singularity. In fact, your three dimensional self is not even aware of its composition, of it being converted into pure data at the super heated event horizon. In actuality, though, your three dimensional body is now acting as nothing more than a hologram, a projection of the two dimensional information present at the event horizon.

Now suppose I suddenly felt a wave of remorse over throwing you into a black hole, or perhaps I just did not want to go to prison. If I had the technology, and the knowhow, I could extract the pure data from the event horizon, and convert that information into energy and matter, thus creating a new you. Actually, it would be the exact same you as before, with all the memories of what happened after you crossed the event horizon (assuming you weren't crushed by the immense amount of gravity).

The general idea is that information is always conserved. It will always exist, and has in fact always existed. More importantly, that matter, energy, and information are interchangeable. Cast your mind back to the Composer and remember what happened to the personnel on the Ivanoff Research Station when they were composed. What we were seeing was matter and energy being converted into machine data, into information. We saw their bodies being destroyed, but they themselves were not being destroyed. Much like when an object passes the event horizon of a black hole, they too were being changed into a different state of being. The same could be held true for the process in which human AIs are created.

This new idea about black holes has been expanded in the form of the Holographic Universe Theory. This theory contends that the entire universe is nothing more than one massive event horizon, that everything contained within our realm of existence is actually encoded as pure information on a near limitless two dimensional plane along the cosmological horizon. In fact, if this theory is to be believed, then the third dimension does not actually exist. The universe is only two dimensional, and we only perceive the third dimension as an illusion.

Consider a 3D movie. When you put on the special glasses and look at the screen you are given the illusion that what you are seeing is three dimensional when actually you are only looking at the projection of a two dimensional reel of film. The same thing is true with paintings, pictures, or video games. When you play Halo you can move around in three dimensions, but the third dimension itself as you see it on your T.V. screen is an illusion. What you are actually looking at is two dimensional, the same way your mind creates the third dimension when you look a photograph. The entire universe may be nothing more than a hologram, two dimensional bits of code being projected in three dimensions.

But this does not necessarily mean that Cortana survived. I mean, I could reduce you down to atoms and I could hardly get away with saying that the now incomprehensible pile of matter is you. Similarly, Cortana could have been reduced down to nothing but bits, and even if all those bits of information were gathered together unless you had them in precisely the right order you could hardly call that jumble of information her.

It is here that I must make an appeal to quantum computers.

Traditional computers are very limited in their processing power. There is only a limited number of actions they can do at one time, and though computers have gotten smaller and more powerful over time, eventually we are going to hit a road block with just how smart computers can be, unless we start building them on the quantum level. If you build a computer using quantum mechanical principles then you can make use of a peculiar trait of quantum particles. They can be in multiple places at once. If you were to build a quantum computer, and they are working on building one, you would have a machine capable of performing hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of actions at once. It would completely dwarf the computing power of even the brainiest of supercomputers we have today. One would think that the UNSC has already mastered this science, as it would be the only way Smart AIs could function as they do.

This has given rise to another idea, or rather breathed life into a rather old one. That the universe is in some sense alive. That it is a sort of quantum computer on a grand scale, a being which exists far beyond our ability to comprehend and encompasses all life, matter, energy, and size. It is not unlike the Precursor concept of what the Mantel truly was, that it too encompassed all life, matter, and energy, and it is also very similar to the Forerunner idea of living time. Indeed, it was Bornstellar who said, "The universe lives, but not as we do." This idea is known as Hylozoism, and in its contemporary form combines both philosophy and science, much like the Precursors did.

And so we come to the final argument, the final piece in the puzzle that may just give us a plausible explanation of how exactly Cortana could have survived.

She survived because the universe _remembers _her. In actuality, the memory the universe has of her, and Cortana herself, would be one and the same. She has been encoded into the very fabric of the universe, which is alive, existing in a way far beyond imagination, for as Stephen King would say the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite, and the living brain cannot conceive of a non living one. She exists. She has always existed, and will always continue to exist. Cortana is now truly raw information, unbound by the need to exist in either her chip or within the confines of a system. Her data may be spread out, jumbled beyond recognition, but it is still there, and it can still be brought back together.

But in order to do this we must make an appeal to Deus Ex Machina, and that is a whole different argument.

**A/N: So it looks like I'll have to drag this out into three parts after all. I hope I didn't confuse anyone with this. If I did, or if you feel like I have misrepresented any of the scientific ideas in here please let me know and I'll make corrections. Also, once again if you disagree with me on any points don't be afraid to let me know. **


End file.
